Tuesday, June 3, 2008

June Gardening

We've yet to get back on track with our garden.

We're getting most of our produce from the CSA and the farmers markets, but we are growing some. We've had lettuce in our garden for a few months, but I think it will bolt in the next few weeks. The Limestone (bibb) and Red Sails are doing the best, however, the Simpson and Sierra will be done by the end of this week. We're past harvesting individual leaves, and have been eating 3-6 heads a week, plus what we get from the CSA. J-Baby is looking forward to the end of lettuce season.

We have tomatoes from last year's vines. We have oranges and boysenberries. I lost some of my herbs in the heat wave (my fault for still having them container planted), and the basil starts in the freak hailstorm that hit right before Memorial Day. The neighbor has plenty of lemons to share, which is nice.

I checked last year's garden journal, and we planted this same upcoming weekend last year. We put in corn, acorn squash, fennel, zucchini, yellow crookneck, cucumber, lettuce, chard, and watermelons. The corn, acorn squash, and zucchini did the best. The fennel didn't germinate, and it was too hot for the lettuce and chard.

So I think we'll plant again this weekend. Not corn, which was too water intensive for what we got, but definitely zucchini and winter squash, and some larger tomato starts if we can find them. I'm going to try chard again, in a cooler, shadier spot (we grew it successfully in our late winter 2007 planting). We have to try cucumber again, this time with a trellis.

I have to admit that the CSA has dampened our incentive to grow more of our own food. At first we were working hard to cope with what we got each week. Now that we have a good system going we find that we're not getting enough, so we hit the farmers markets regularly. So we'll try again, and hopefully have a good harvest.